First of all, Happy New Year everyone! I hope that your holiday season was filled with much happiness. For Christmas, my son gave me a gift of a new game, " Civilization 4. " I love strategy games and could not wait to get into it. I was not sure in the beginning of what the requirements would be before hand regarding dexterity and actual game play. Due to my muscle weakness, I use voice dictation to compensate for very limited hand movement. I eagerly pursued this endeavor utilizing WSR to play the game.

This game is a strategy game and not a first person shooter type game. It is much more dexterity friendly in that you plan moves and make them one at a time among all adversaries. There is no pressure to complete a move before you are ready and you do so by pressing enter. Using WSR and saying press Enter worked fine in playing your move. Using mouse grid, I had very little difficulty selecting parts of the board that I wanted to explore or move pieces to. Occasionally, I found a pop up window that needed to be closed utilizing a mouse. That proved a little more difficult.

All in all, I enjoyed the experiment though it was a bit more time consuming than just playing with a mouse. The potential to build macros for improved game play exists though I did not spend the time to do so. I also explored the game of hearts which comes on vista and found that it works and very well with WSR. In both games, WSR responded quicker in game play than Dragon. I have also used WSR in flying flight simulator in vista. What kind of gaming experiences have you had utilizing voice dictation?

Okay, there does not seem to be many gamers out there. I was a bit surprised that there were no responses to my post about utilizing voice-recognition for playing games. Please feel free to share your ideas about why that may be so. I will be looking forward to your input.

, I am a user who is greatly interested in using voice recognition for gaming purposes. I used to use a program known as Voice Commander and it is no longer available. Accordingly, I have been trying the WSR macro program using the Windows Toolkit to make Voice Command macros.

Thus far, I have been reasonably successful at using it for this purpose. It's easy when there is a hotkey which can be assigned to a particular command, but as of this moment, I have yet to determine if mouse commands can be integrated into a voice command macro. Such a capability would be extraordinarily useful.

I vividly recall that when IBM introduced its ViaVoice program back in the 1990s, it had a voice program to control the mouse that was different than that used in the current Vista program. Basically, one would be able to have the cursor go anywhere on the screen and click by just using one voice command. One would create the voice command and then assign the location of where such a command would send the cursor on the computer screen and left click once the cursor reached that predetermined location, all with one command.

Perhaps this capability exists in the Microsoft program

, but maybe I have yet to discover it.

Thus, you're not alone

. Using voice command macros is a fabulous way to play a game especially if you have weakness in your arms as apparently we both do.

Hi Jerry,You can check out Voice Finger, it was made for disabilities in general, and gamers in particular. It has a better mouse grid (36x36 coordinates, and you can add more) and shorter keyboard commands. You'd need to run Civilization 4 in windowed mode, since the mouse grid disappears when the game runs in full screen mode.

I've been using Windows Speech Recognition to play games. But as others have mentioned, most of the time you'd need to run the game in windowed mode so that you can use speech recognition. I've been playing games on Steam (Marvel Puzzle Quest, Hero Academy, and Kingdom Rush) by voice. Kingdom Rush is tough though because it is a tower defense game and sometimes you can't react fast enough.

Also have been playing Carcassonne purchased from the Windows Store without any problems and it's not even in windowed mode.

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